Replies to post #146839 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

I suspected that I got something wrong when I typed it. It should have read XScale (which came out of Intel's purchase of StrongARM from DEC).

OK. XScale is very distinct from StrongARM in microarchitecture and
design methodology.

The problem with Xscale was 1) it was designed by "B" and "C" teams
who didn't get support like the guys behind the flagship x86 core design
teams, 2) Xscale was made in Intel's high performance semi processes
which were not appropriate (high power/cost) for most ARM applications,
and 3) didn't offer the customizability of alternative paths to ARM.


I still maintain that the decision to sell XScale to Marvell was an absolute disaster and Intel has lost a whole decade due to that fateful decision.

How? It was a minor side line business at best. Marvell isn't exactly
getting rich selling XScale derived products.

Lost a decade of what? A low ROI rump business that distracts from
the x86 cash cows?

Let me ask anyone who thinks doing ARM chips is some magic bullet
for Intel:

What is the value Intel can bring to a low ASP commodity that is
sold in thousands of highly customized variants? There is no magic
Apple A10 high runner merchant ARM processor socket out there for
Intel to aim for. The A10 brings value because its Apple's in-house
processor for a product whose entire platform from silicon to hardware
to OS is a captive proprietary luxury product that sells billions upons
billions of dollars worth of flash memory to consumers at incredible
markup. Everything else ARM is a commodity with dozens of sharks
fighting over every single scrap and crumb.

There is no "there" there for Intel.

[morrowinder]

Ideal Inv: You are still misrembering what happened...

I was at those sales conferences. Intel had big dreams about getting in to phones back then. But they could not get by Texas Instruments. Back then TI dominated phone silicon. The real issue was that the phone manufacturers didn't want to pay what Intel wanted and they absolutely didn't want what happened in the PC market. They wanted cheap silicon as chipguy suggested. Now Qualcomm did ultimately displace TI somewhat(they still have silicon in todays phones but not as much). But Qualcomm did it on the back of their CDMA modem technology. And Apple just went its own way and acquirred an ARM design company. Even if Intel had gotten the first iPhone design, I believe Apple would have started its own chip company. Why not? They have billions of dollars sitting around. And even if they didn't Intel was never guaranteed to keep the design for long. The problem with ARM is that any old company can design a chip with it. And that means you can get booted from a design very easily. You don't recall obviously, but Intel had already started losing pocket PC designs to Samsung. HP was the culprit in that episode. Because it was cheaper and it was ARM and worked fine.